Categories
Module 4 Assignment Getting Data

Module 4: Getting Data (AKA Spain without the S)

WEBSCRAPING

API

GEOCODE

GENDER INFERENCING

This week was a lot of work for me, the most difficult of these assignments was the Gender Inferencing one. Explaining what each line does is certainly tricky.

One of my issues with these coding/python assignments are that I have a very difficult time reading instructions, so I have to constantly force myself to reread what we’re doing.

The large blocks of text, followed by the coding windows make is easy for me to gloss over the instructions and try to do the assignment, and then I have to backtrack to try to figure out what is going on.

There are a lot of similarities between coding and writing history, in each we have to be specific and careful of our word choices and syntax.

I have been looking for an API for several Southern newspapers, I think it would be interesting to examine ways that newspapers in the South, and perhaps nationwide, were responsible for instigating lynch mobs, race riots, and other horrific injustices.

I think that the ability to process and strip large amounts of data will be most useful in researching a topic like the one proposed above. While it is probably too large for this class, it would be a cool, though thoroughly horrible, topic to research.

One reply on “Module 4: Getting Data (AKA Spain without the S)”

I tell my undergrads that historians are careful readers and careful writers; programming puts those skills to use 🙂

Assignments look good, although in your webscraping notebook your strip function isn’t working for some reason. From a quick glance through I’m not sure where the issue is, but if you plan to scrape or fetch data for the final project it’s something to keep an eye on so you don’t have to clean the extra out by hand.

Comments are closed.